Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Experimental MacRuby Branch Is 3x Faster

Posted by kdawson on from the deep-red-cocoa dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Zen and the Art of Programming published an article about MacRuby's new experimental 0.5 branch (project blog entry here). According to the included benchmarks, Apple's version of Ruby could already, at this early stage of its development, be about three times as fast as the fastest Ruby implementation available elsewhere."

7 of 191 comments (clear)

  1. Why MacRuby Matters? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Why MacRuby Matters (Present & Future)?

    Apparently because an experimental incomplete version of Ruby is fast. Colour me unimpressed.

    1. Re:Why MacRuby Matters? by NoTheory · · Score: 4, Insightful

      MacRuby matters for a lot of reasons. Early benchmarks aren't one of them. http://blog.headius.com/2009/03/on-benchmarking.html

      MacRuby's potential for Cocoa integration is fantastic and great, and something i very very much want to see.

      It's not clear however what relationship benchmarks at this stage (with an incomplete implementation) will actually correspond to in the future. They are a total red herring for discussion.

      Look at MacRuby on the merits! not the benchmarks!

      --
      There are lives at stake here!
    2. Re:Why MacRuby Matters? by tyrione · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Well, if you ask me, I suspect that someday in a future version of the Mac OS, Ruby will be a first-class language for application development alongside or perhaps replacing Objective-C. I think Apple likes Ruby and its aesthetic. A lot of the Rails devs are Mac developers, and I think that's where it sparked.

      First Class, maybe. Replacing ObjC? You're prediction makes LSD trips seem dull.

  2. Yeah , a true renaissance by Viol8 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "LLVM supports effective optimization at compile time, link-time (particularly interprocedural), run-time"

    Amazing, truly unique ideas. If only someone had thought of doing this 30 years ago... oh wait...

  3. Re:The questions remains... by FooBarWidget · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Every time a story is posted about Ruby performance improvements, someone will post something along the lines of "x times faster than super ultra duper slow is still slow". Even if Ruby is 1000 times faster, there will still be people complaining. My guess is that none of these people actually use Ruby in production to be able to tell how much interpreter performance actually matters in the grand scheme of things.

  4. Re:Ruby? by NoTheory · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Er, way to troll? If you'd like to do your ridiculous hello world you can stick to:

    puts "i like beans"

    And it's really unclear what "it" you're referring to. Because Ruby, for me, is a good blend of the things i wanted from Perl and Lisp with a side of Object Orientation. I get all the laziness and conveniences of Perl, and i can do all the crazy stuff i'd want to do with Lisp. So imo, you're way off base.

    --
    There are lives at stake here!
  5. Re:The questions remains... by Otterley · · Score: 4, Insightful

    These days I'm writing exclusively in Ruby and it is "fast enough" (even with 1.8.X).

    I suspect that's because your website doesn't receive thousands of dynamic requests per second.